Hope as a Way of Being
A Feature Review of
Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis
Norman Wirzba
Hardcover: Yale University Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Justin Cober-Lake
We, like probably everyone who came before or after us, live in troubled, often discouraging times. We need hope, but you can’t summon hope through sheer effort anymore than you can calm anxiety simply by trying harder to relax. Professor Norman Wirzba recognizes that challenge, but in Love’s Braided Dance, he addresses it with clear eyes and a distinct lack of optimism. Instead he grounds himself in the reality of the world around him, finding the bases of hope and the sources of its perpetuation to be available in an array of places, requiring only attention and vulnerability to discover. As he guides us through our modern disease and its possible cures, he unlocks the key to finding a resonant, meaningful life as well as a tangled but wondrous hope.
Foundationally, Wirza reframes the concept of hope. “But what if hope isn’t really, or at least not fundamentally, a thing to possess? What if hope is, instead, a loving way of being that is animated by an affirmation of the goodness of this life … worth cherishing, defending, and celebrating?” (15-16) Hope isn’t something we have or feel, but something we do and create. Wirzba doesn’t consider how we can have hope, but how we can build and sustain it through a variety of means. He describes the book’s chapters as “complementary sketches that together draw a picture of what a hopeful life looks like” (14). These “sketches” – his word, but one suggesting far quicker takes than his obviously deeply considered reasonings – don’t provide a linear progress from less to more hope, but rather show the different areas of life through which we build hope. This multifaceted approach holds together through Wirzba’s continued commitment to community, place, and the proper conception of the whole undertaking.
The first full chapter redirects our focus immediately. Wirzba writes, “Let’s shift the question, then, from ‘What gives you hope?’ to ‘What do you love?” and adds, “Hope becomes inauthentic the moment it ceases to be moved by love” (17). This idea resists blind optimism (a trait that Wirzba suggests restricts true hope) because it keeps people engaged with what they actually care about. Rather than accepting the status quo and wishing for the best, true hope born of love creates a response, which could be the recognition or creation of a loving community. In this way, hope becomes conceptualized around intimacy and connection, meaning we have a reason to move forward and a community to help us do so (in whatever sense we might mean by “forward”).
Wirzba not only resists clueless optimism, he situates many of his meditations in contexts that are far from naïve. He grounds them in some of the most difficult struggles imaginable. (If the book has a flaw, it’s that Wirzba can sometimes spend so much time in bad places that it can be tough as a reader to emerge from them enough to start thinking about hope productively again). He considers at length the trauma of World War II in Europe – the starvation, the rape, the terror – and moves forward to contemporary existential crises, notably the effects of climate change and a generally uncertain future. We live in an age in which hope is heavily needed and seemingly inaccessible, the sort of time that, cynically, might just be a facet of the human condition.
Fortunately, Wirzba serves as a more-than-able guide to discovering hope in a variety of places, some more unlikely than others. “Place” is truly the right word, because much of Wirzba’s hope is grounded in location. Wendell Berry’s influence, explicit in the title, runs through this line of thought. He considers his grandfather’s work on a farm, recognizing “his small labor as a profound expression of the mutual nurture that is the beating heart of places of belonging and lives of hope” (60). We live busy, isolated lives, and thinking about his family’s connection to a piece of land and its residents, Wirzba finds “[t]he remedy for a broken, lonely, and commodified world is fairly straightforward: nurture the places and creatures that nurture us” (70). In hopeless times, dig into where you are; appreciate and give to that place, allowing it and its people to give back to you.
Of course, that’s much easier said than done. Wirzba ably illuminates his concepts in a variety of ways, moving beyond what might sound like an updated take on living deliberately or counting your blessings. One of his most fascinating chapters focuses on hopeful architecture. He begins with the terrors of concentration camp architecture and considers how “violence is a material structure and not only an event. A spirit of violence isn’t simply active on a world. It becomes built into it” (110). If evil can manifest in design, so can goodness. Urban planning, for example, can intentionally direct us into community and local interaction. Buildings can, in their very structure inspire us. Wirzba details a hospital in the Rwandan village of Butaro. The design uses beautiful simplicity, ample vegetation and natural light – all typical ideas on the surface. More than that, it considers location, drawing on local wisdom and culture, and allowing community members to participate in its design and construction. Its storytelling and history invigorate residents and visitors. “By reflecting a loving intention in their design and construction, neighborhoods and buildings convey that people who work and play and rest there are also loved,” Wirzba writes. “Hopeful ways of being need homes, workplaces, gathering and recreational spaces … that say life is precious and that it will be protected, nurtured, and celebrated” (125). A hospital provides a place where community and geography come together in both object and process to create and amplify hope.
Wirzba’s book finds its strength in its lack of naivete and its consistent ability to provide practical and lasting application of a possibly ethereal theory. He argues “that hope is born when people come together and commit to the nurture of each other and their shared places” and “that it is false to speak of an individual and isolated life” (150). He then shows how these ideas can function in the real world, on a farm, in a building, in an economy, in the environment, in acts of love and forgiveness, and more. Hope, one might say, is a scarce commodity, but under Wirzba’s rubric, hope is neither scarce nor a commodity, as long as we understand what it truly is, and are willing to cultivate it.
Justin Cober-Lake
Justin Cober-Lake a pastor in central Virginia. He holds an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Virginia and has worked in academic publishing for the past 15 years. His editing and freelance writing have focused mostly on cultural criticism, particularly pop music.
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